Timing has to be right for DJs on New Year’s Eve

It was 11:55 p.m. when DJ Adrian A stood amid the massive crowd at Bootie SF’s New Year’s Eve party at San Francisco’s DNA Lounge. The plan had been for Adrian A and Trixxie Carr, two of the vocalists for the club night’s mashup band Smash Up Derby, to tackle the countdown together, then launch into a live rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” mixed with “Blitzkrieg Bop” as the first song of the new year.

Instead, a prerecorded version of the mashup was already blaring from the sound system. Carr was trying to push to the stage, yelling at people to move while holding a live microphone, and all of it was happening five minutes early.

“Midnight happens,” the mashup DJ now says, laughing. “And if you’re not ready for 12 midnight — and everyone’s got a cell phone, they’ve got the time — you’re a loser. I always say that the one thing I look forward to on New Year’s Eve is 12:01.”

In ballrooms, nightclubs and every open space that can hold a group of people in the city, revelers bring in the new year with toasts (or shots), kisses and camaraderie. But the person with the best view of the room that evening may be the disc jockey, standing behind the decks providing the night’s soundtrack.

For the DJ, New Year’s Eve can present challenges. Those who play some of the city’s biggest parties may have to widen their music library; there’s a percentage of the celebrants who are not regular clubgoers, and might require a more mainstream-oriented playlist than the disc jockey is used to spinning.

“Musically, you have to cover a little more ground,” says San Jose’s DJ Cutso. “If you’re used to playing hip-hop and R&B, you probably have to incorporate some pop, some Top 40, to please everybody. It’s not just the regular clientele, so you’ve got to have something for everybody.”

Regularly occurring or heavily branded club events get to circumvent that to some extent. For instance, partygoers going to Bootie SF know that the night will be filled with danceable mashups. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t party pressures associated with the evening.

“The audience is familiar, but they want something special, something extra,” says Ozgood, DJ and founder of Afrolicious, an Afrobeat club night that developed into a touring live band. A former San Francisco resident, Ozgood has performed in the city on New Year’s Eve either as a DJ or an Afrolicious member for most of the last decade. “There’s an added anticipation, and it all revolves around a certain time of the night, so everyone performing has to put that into consideration: What are we going to do to build to midnight? And after it, what are we going to do to take that energy into the new year for as many hours as we can keep going?”

That timing can be the other tricky element of the evening for a party’s DJ. In the club world, set times can be a little fluid; the opening set scheduled to end at 11 p.m. can easily become 11:15 with no major harm. But an entire gathering that’s celebrating one specific minute in an evening means a sort of precision with time that isn’t always an element of the DJ world.

“New Year’s is always fun,” says San Francisco DJ Eddie Santana. “That new crowd, it’s a little bit of a test, like a game. You want to give everybody a good time, so you have to read the crowd more. You also get to produce something new for the countdown every year. And then the first song right after the countdown, everyone gets crazy and riled up.”

Even as the night turns to day and the crowd thins as partygoers stumble home, Adrian A says knowing that their tunes helped usher in the new year can still be satisfying.

“I love that feeling of, ‘Hey, we made it to the end of the night, and we’re still standing.’”